


A Strange Flower, Suitable to Any Occasion

by AceQueenKing



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Canon Incest, Eventual Hades/Persephone retelling, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, In as much as Chronos eating his children can be seen as child abuse, POV Outsider, Parent & Child Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-10-19 16:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17604503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: Her husband is in hell now, and sometimes, Rhea visits. Hades, as always, accompanies her down, though his presence could hardly be called comforting.When Rhea comes up from the down below, she is alone, until the time she isn’t.“What’s it like?” Demeter's daughter blurts out. “The Underworld, I mean?”





	1. Before

  _“The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower—suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.” -_ Terry Randall, Stage Door

* * *

Her husband is in hell now, and sometimes, Rhea visits.

In his last moments above-ground, he was a squalling, pitiful thing, lungs full of wailing as his sons pulled him in irons. Being interned in Tartarus has done nothing to soften his madness; always he calls for her, _Rhea Rhea Rhea Rhea._ And sooner or later, she answers, as she must; deep in her ancient heart, she loves him still.

Zeus gives her a proper send-off every time, a banquet beyond compare that lasts all the day if none of the night. She thinks, sometimes, that Zeus must wonder if this is the last time he’ll see her, if suddenly Hades will say he plans to keep her, as he does her brothers and her sisters and, yes, her beloved if dangerous husband, too. It is hard to say. Her sons are no less crafty than their father, if each in their own ways.

Her fifth-born, Poseidon, is boisterously brave and sixth-born Zeus magnanimously charming; fourth-born Hades, well, he has patience and some sort of cold stratagem in those quiet, dark eyes, though none on Olympus can say what it is. He never comes up to see them, not anymore. Hades – first devoured, last retrieved – is the child she knows the least.

Still, when night falls on Olympus, he does come for her. For his mother, Hades drives his chariot to the tip of the underworld itself, offers his hand, if not a smile. He has his father’s curls and wide chin, but it’s her eyes that shine when she sees him, wet with memories in the dimness of underworld light.

He is both Chronos’ double and his jailer, Hades; she tries, always, to find some quibble with the way he comports himself because every move he makes is _nothing_ like the man she expects him to be, the living ghost whose face he inherited. Chronos was an expressive man, warm with a laugh that could shatter glass, how loud it was; Hades, born to be his usurper, betrays nothing, says little, and speaks quietly. Zeus and Poseidon titter sometimes, drunk on nectar and wine, that poor Hades got the worst of the three lots; Rhea isn’t certain he didn’t pick this on purpose. He was always a strange, quiet thing; her only child who never cried. 

But, she will say, in fairness to her strange-son, that he is always politely receptive to his mother, if never more than that. He always gives her a royal if impersonal welcome. She may as well be one of Hades long-estranged siblings, or one of their many, many children; he offers her dresses of linen and wool and a rich, thin cloth whose softness speaks of a different origin far east of where her other son’s kingdoms set, but it is all plain, drab, impersonal; black on black, white on white.

Brother Iapetus wouldn't have given her such finery in his day; the underworld was a different thing then, all caves and caverns and skittering ghosts. He would shrug and suggest his sister sleep upon the ground, as he did. Iapetus believed in death as the ultimate teacher; _survival of the fittest, dearest sister_ , he would have said, then laughed his big, booming laugh and snuggled near to his wife, Clymene, whose shoulders were always so soft and lovely for a goddess whose job was so merciless. Rhea remembers being a young girl, curled on Clymene’s soft lap, dozing as she listened to them chuckling as they measured out mortal lives.

She does not think either do much laughing these days, bound to the darkest parts of what was once their very own home. Perhaps Iapetus finds comfort in this final test of his will; she hopes so. She always liked Iapetus.

Hades – her fourth born child but her first son - has no wife, no kin beyond that that lay in Olympus above him and Tartarus below. He is a quieter sort of justice, if as merciless as Clymene and horribly greedy as Iapetus in his own ways. He has built, out of Iapetus’ caverns, his own vast castle, though it resembles no castle seen above; he has poured the foundations to his own cities in a pattern discernible only in his own mind, drawn up his own rivers that circle his realm like an embrace. He was born in darkness and never lived out of it long enough to be aware of things like geography. She isn’t even sure he knows what creature comforts he denies to his mortal souls – no gardens, no walkways, and no sunlight. Iapetus didn’t care, but Hades…she isn’t so sure. One does not build a city if one does not expect their subjects to _use_ it.

And he builds his mother has a room of her own in his castle full of winding walkways and no windows; a nice room, large, magnificently bedecked in warm blankets and comfortable pillows;  for whenever she wishes to use it, he says, and she should be thankful.

And she is thankful — if never more than that.

* * *

Hades has a room for them  _all_  actually. Individually. Entire wings dedicated to the family that will never, ever come to him willingly. 

She discovers this, looking for clues of just what Chronos’ eldest son does beyond torture his father all day. She is walking through her son’s estate late at night (she thinks – it is, technically, always night in the Underworld, and lateness is merely a state of mind), paddling through his winding halls after the King himself has long-since retired to his own rooms. Rhea thinks that all these absent rooms with Gods’ names writ large on them is just a bit alarming - not enough to report to Zeus, but enough that she dwells upon it when she pads back through stone, empty halls to her bed at night, under covers thick and dense as briar-thorns.   
  
Sometimes she wonders if perhaps, heartless Hades has internalized his role as jailer just a bit  _too_  well. Does he sit and merely wait for the day the eldest comes into his own at last, even if only in the death of all above? Or perhaps, she thinks, Hades is lonely. Perhaps he simply, desperately wishes for heavenly arms to dig deep and remember that one of their own still lives deep in the underground, to come and throw arms around him and thank him for his sacrifice, his service.

They won’t, she knows; it is not the way of the Gods above to concern themselves with the Gods below. If Hades thinks they will hold eternal gratitude for holding back the Titans, he is wrong. Gods’ memories are long, but their attention spans are as short as their mortal ilk. _No, my little one,_ she thinks, _they have no idea you exist anymore as anything but a distant threat._ Iapetus and Chronos were closer than Zeus and Hades. Iapetus was dragged to Tartarus still living but torn asunder by Hades' bident and Poseidon's trident, still defending Chronos without arms or legs, each part of him fighting for his king-brother's honor; would Hades so much as lift one finger to come to Zeus’ aid, should the situation require it? She truly knows not.

Hades shows no sign of tipping his hand toward becoming anything she can understand; he is dutiful, if only just. He makes sure to see her, gathers her for dinner, gently takes her by the arm and takes her to a stateroom that could seat each and every one of their kin. It seats only two, and she suspects this is a large guest list as far as Hades' entertainment goes. The ridiculous table only highlights the distance between them.

“Do you like your room?” He asks, as he always does, voice quiet as he sups on asphodel roots. She sticks to ambrosia and nectar she brings herself for the journey, and finds his choice bizarre – there is no need to dine like the dead for the underworld's God; Iapetus did not. Why eat the mark of eternal darkness when another option is available? He could live on Olympus; climb upstairs when his day is done.  He doesn’t. She isn’t sure when he’s been on Olympus last, truth be told. Centuries ago, at minimum. She isn’t sure if Zeus even bothers to include him in his council, anymore.

“It is fine,” she says, and he nods, and that is the end of their conversation, as always. He does not ask of his siblings above and she does not ask of hers below. They eat in a silence that looms large as Erebus itself, as if the underworld itself swallows their feelings whole. If he feels conflicted about taking her to see his father, he never shows it. If he wonders if it causes her pain, he never asks of it.

She supposes she should be thankful for Hades' magnanimity, but like those gods above, she finds her long-buried son's habits strange, and his heart far too cold. When he pushes in his chair after only a few minutes, promising he will take her to see his father after a mid-night’s rest, she is relieved to be free of his company. When he asks if she wishes him to ask Charon to see her back, she shakes her head no and he leaves it at that.

She finds her way back to her rooms by herself, and thinks of her strange son, and his strange ways: he still calls Chronos _father_ , she notices, but has he ever called her _mother_? She stares around the room he has built for her, every luxury present – but nothing of her own essence inherent in the room. On Olympus, her bed is stitched with fine linens of her royal sigil, with lions and hawks darting in silver firs. In Hades, her black hay bed is made with plain white blankets, and little else. 

Her son does not know her any better than she knows him, she realizes with a dull ache in her chest.

* * *

 He always accompanies her down to Tartarus, though he does not have to. Her rebel days are long done.

“You do not have to come,” she murmurs, as always; he bids no answer as he pushes off from the coast himself, driving their iron-boat across the Phlegethon. It isn’t as if one must be master of the underworld itself to reach Tartarus; one needs only a strong rowing arm. The river itself is the only source of light and sound as they travel. She does not talk to him during this portion of the travel, instead closing her eyes and waiting only for Chronos.

No matter how many times she sees him in Tartarus, it does _not_ get easier.

He is bound to the ground there, at the shore; his legs and arms, shackled in manacles. He is a far cry from what he once was. His raiment is no longer royal purple, but black with dirt, with filth. The only river in Tartarus is the river of fire, and it casts almost no light, but still she sees his face in the distance as they come upon the shore. Hades face remains in shadow, but she knows it to be impassive.

“My favorite son,” Chronos bellows as Hades steps off the boat; he’s well lit then, next to the fire-bath of the lake, and he steps more so into the light to better talk to his father chained upon the shore. “How long has it been, Hades? You were the tastiest child, you know.”

Hades shrugs long shoulders. “A visitor, father,” he says; next to one another, the resemblance couldn’t be more obvious, and Rhea’s heart hurts. She wishes Hades was easier to love, or to hate; this constant ambiguity is nothing like his bold father and wounds her so. She steps next to him to better see Chronos in the meager light, and his eyes spark upon hers like a flame.

“Rhea,” her beloved madman says, licking chapped lips. “You _came_.”

“I did,” she says, as she always does. Her hard-hearted son watches unmoved as she sobs, raining tears into Chronos’ eager mouth. “I love you,” she babbles, for he always deprives her of reason. She spreads her hands over manacled limbs that can never hold her again but she remembers the feel of them in his burned, callused fingertips, and that makes it all the worse. “I’m sorry,” she says; she does not regret her choices, but still, she hates to see him suffer so. Hades taps his foot, impatient, as Rhea caresses Chronos’ brow; Chronos' mad voice quiet as she strokes his head.

For a few hours, they say nothing; Chronos, soothed by his wife's hand on his brow; Rhea, in hell but whole; Hades, visibly bored. He has never argued with her over the point of these visits as she knows Poseidon would; never brow-beats her into having less time with her husband because he is busy, as she knows Zeus might; never even gave her the pity that Hestia or Demeter might, nor the cold fury that burns in Hera’s eyes every time Rhea announces her desire to visit their estranged father, buried below.  Hades is still as death and just as patient; he simply waits.

When she goes to the river and retrieves fire to purify Chronos’ suffering skin, he offers neither opposition nor aid. When she casts a long glance among long-suffering cousins and uncles and aunts and fathers, all manacled to her mother’s well-scarred skin, he offers neither condolences nor sympathy. He waits for her to take her hand, to tell him she is ready, to tell Chronos goodbye as he begins his long and ever-unceasing wail _: Rhea, Rhea, Rhea, Rhea_ echoes across the deep caverns of Tartarus, and still, Hades says nothing, shows nothing.

He accompanies her back to the iron boat in the cacophonous wails of the damned, and they push off, sailing back to Erebus’ distant, hazy shore.

As always, they only get a short distance from shore before she asks, “Is all that really necessary, to keep them bound in the dark like that?” as she always does. She longs for some reaction to her words, and chooses them to wound him, to wind him up, to make him show something – _anything_ _at all!_ But there is no change in his mottled brow, and he simply sighs. As always.

“Yes,” he says, with all the weight of his office in the word. She folds her arms, and he holds the oar, and they ride the rest of the way through the Phlegethon with little more than silence on their tongues, as they always do.   
  
On her better days, she tries to leave quickly after these visits, but there are not many good days for her, anymore. Seeing her husband is exhausting, the trip to Tartarus more so, and her inscrutable son most exhausting of all. She is an old goddess and her power drains quickly; often, she has to stay in the underworld, under Hades' suffocating care.

He will lead her, as always, back to her room in silence. She will squeeze his hand, but will find no warmth in it and offer no thanks for what he has done for her. And he will turn with no goodbye, no _goodnight, mother_ , on his lips; he will stalk back to an iron throne and, presumably, a lonely iron bed after.

And she will lie on a feather-light but dream-heavy bed, where she will dream of Chronos, not the mad Chronos who howls in the dark but the man who she loved once, the golden king. He was magnanimous and kind and clever and true in those days; he was cruel and mad and paranoid, too. She loved both sides of the coin, once and did not mind which way it fell, so long as it was always in her hand. 

She dreams of the man she loved, both the king who came to her bed speaking sweet words and the dictator whose children he held in his hands and he devoured. Always, in the dreams, she remembers _she had let him eat them_ , offered no resistance as he devoured baby Hades, then Hera, Demeter, and Hestia soon after, declaring a daughter no more loyal than a son. Poseidon, last of them all, squalling as he slid into his father’s gullet, her face mute to his red-faced squalling even in dreams. She offered little protest then and offers none in her dreams now.

She awakens queasy, mind woozy and skin slick.

In her darkest moods, she sometimes wonders if it isn't Hades directing the Erinyes to drown her in her own guilt.

She cannot shake her suspicion of him, even if sometimes her son comes in the room when he hears her sobs; he does not ask what is wrong and she does not offer any reason for her tears. He presses a heavy, iron hand to her brow in imitation of kindness, but all it inspires in her is a reminder of all she’s lost.

As always, she tells him she does not require his assistance, and, as always, he leaves, not even with the grace to be insulted by her words. He is as mute as ever, her long-lost child.


	2. During

When Rhea comes up from the down below, she is alone, until the time she isn’t. The fates have funny ways of making monumental changes come in the subtle _plink_ of a coin turning in one’s hand – husbands who are kind, until they’re cruel; daughters and sons who are children, until they’re not.

On a trip that is much like any other, she comes above alone but not alone, feels new eyes staring upon her. Even though she is already distracted by Chronos’ thundering voice begging for her return, Rhea still feels the little Earth goddess spying upon her. It is Demeter's daughter, she can tell by the girl’s wheat-colored hair and tawny skin; Demeter’s looks, and, once, Rhea’s too, long ago. There’s none of Demeter’s motherly charms in this thing, though, all wide eyes and slim-ankles. Young, foolish; this one is an adult, but only barely, full of unrealized power and critically short of wisdom.

She watches the girl as the girl watches her: she is kind and sweet looking, verdant; the sort of goddess that any poet would be glad to sing the praises of. Flowers bloom at her feet as she rocks shyly back and forth on her toes — she is the sort of unimportant little Goddess who matters little in any pantheon. Rhea is not used to being observed at such a delicate time, and watches her coolly. The girl doesn’t seem to sense she is intruding at all.

“Hello,” she says, trying to remember the girl’s name. What was it? She’s not the first child born in that generation, but not the last; somewhere in the middle of the pack. One of Zeus’ daughters, she can tell; there’s lightning in those cornflower blue eyes, waiting to strike on a sunny day. Persephone, she thinks. An odd, big name for a gawky, little thing.

“What’s it like?” The girl blurts out, rubbing her hands together with nervous energy. She speaks quietly and clumsily. Demeter must not allow her to mix often with her own kind; her god-tongue is oddly accented. “The Underworld, I mean?”

Demeter's daughter whispers this heated question as if it is a secret. Her fingers are dark, coated in dirt. Has she been trying to find her way there, or simply digging space for her plants? There’s a persistent inquisitiveness in her that Rhea notices, a hunger for something more elemental than grass and root, and Rhea looks deeper. She takes inventory of the girl, her dirty dress and kind, blue eyes, and performs an instant, ruthless calculation: she takes the little fertility goddess’ hand and shoves it deep in the dirt. The little thing is pretty enough to draw his attention, inquisitive enough to hold it, and, critically, naïve enough to be more curious of death than fearful.

“You should ask him yourself,” Rhea whispers to the wheat-haired girl, uses her own fertile magic to make the girl spark a shoot through her tender, soft fingers and bury it deep. She does not draw her hand back to the surface when Rhea removes her guiding hand; Rhea watches, for a second. The girl’s tongue sticks out a second, licks the tip of her mouth. Then she frowns, then – after a moment – she smiles.

With that, she leaves Demeter's pretty girl in the dirt, and wonders if perhaps Hades' heavy heart can be assuaged with this sacrifice.

* * *

 

No one notices the girl is missing.

She stays absent that first day through evening supper, then evening-song. Even stubborn Demeter assumes she merely plays late with her sisters and her nymph friends, and Rhea doesn’t tell her daughter what Demeter’s girl seeks now is more than kin and less than kind. When she sees the girl again, yawning in midmorning, she’s wearing a recently hewn necklace with quartz-and-gold asphodel on it. She doesn’t ask where the girl got it, and no one but Rhea notices as Demeter’s unimportant little babe slips out to her fields more and more.

“She is taking to her duties so well,” Demeter coos, thrilled; _no_ , Rhea thinks, _she is not._

Demeter’s daughter comes back with little trinkets; cold ruby and emerald stones she’s dug up with dirty fingernails, elaborate metalwork 'round her neck with designs nobody above would make, but Rhea recognizes: winding golden lines, elaborate silver circles. When Rhea sees her dozing on the plains, a screech owl perched protectively upon her shoulder, she _knows_ : for better or worse, the child’s shoot has blossomed under the ground, and it will not flower aboveground again _._

Rhea watches as the girl’s skirts slowly slip from blue to grey to deepest black. Watches as the little one clings to her mother’s neck, kisses her head, plays a perfect, faithful child rather than being the adult daughter she truly has become. Her childish _chiton_  is no longer appropriate, can only hide so much of her blossoming. 

The little slip of a girl is growing earthbound; she hums strange songs that are long forgotten by the Gods above, and her oddly accented god-tongue trips, sometimes, into old, dead words. No one notices the girl uses these over more modern variants, or if they do, they excuse it, for she is not well-known among her kind and her words are still all stumbling. She communicates better without words. Rhea watches as she grows flowers on dipping vines that tremble toward the ground as if he, below, will see them.

She doubts that he will, or that he would care if he did. Hades has never understood art. 

“Such a devoted child,” Demeter grins; she loves this daughter with a brilliant passion, strong, stubborn second-born Demeter, and Rhea’s heart hurts for what is to come.  _No_ , _daughter_ , she thinks, _the little one is preparing to say goodbye to her girlhood and wishes to leave you good memories of it._ She does not say anything to Demeter of her daughter's changing; it is not her place. But still, despite knowing she is only sometimes welcome, she stays with her earthly, practical daughter, until…well, _until_. Rhea tells herself she is there for support, perhaps; when she is not lying to herself, she can admit, if only to herself, that this is possibly only a distraction from the pounding song her husband screams under the earth.

* * *

 

Rhea lies upon a bed of flowers and field when she visits her earthly daughter – Demeter, like Rhea’s long-lost brother Iapetus, does not believe in the concept of life _indoors_. She stares at the child, who looks back at her as if she is memorizing Rhea and Demeter both in those strange blue eyes that remind her of nothing so much as the foaming shores of the Lethe. The girl touches her hand with a secret smile and Rhea is surprised to find it already cold.

Rhea nods off in the deep barley in this charming tableau, mother and daughter and daughter-of-her-daughter in the fields; it is the closest to relaxed any of their ilk can be. The girl's gaze slips from her mother and mother-of-her-mother to something unknown, beyond the horizon, and she smiles. Even Demeter is at peace, humming an old song, spinning some cornsilk between her fingertips. In Rhea's dreams, she sees her mad husband, running through the fields of wheat and barley, not as he is but in his long-gone glory. In those days, the world was young, and things grew easily. There was no starvation, nothing but plenty for all. She dreams of a table held in a palace made of gold that has long since collapsed to ruin, dreams of a plate on a silver table heaped with flowers and vegetables and well-made sacrifices; she looks across the table as Chronos raises the baby to his lips and devours her first-born, his mouth a gaping, bleeding maw.

She awakes sick, the Erinyes dancing upon her brow again for one panicked second before she realizes that the touch upon her is only her daughter’s hand.

“You cried out,” Demeter says, ice reserved in her voice, and she knows who she has called for. That is the one thing Demeter got from her father: resentment. She is her mother’s in looks and in voice, but that coldness – that could only come from Chronos, who dared to think the world was his even stuffed inside the grave itself.

“He calls to me.” She blinks in the rheumy gloom-light; pale and lifeless as the underworld is the mortal world, when night comes. Demeter looks at her with hard brown eyes and sighs. It's not a new talk. “Always, he calls, my daughter.”

There is a disappointment and bitter hatred in her daughter’s eyes, not for Rhea herself but for Chronos beyond. Demeter was not-so-young as Hades and Poseidon when she was devoured, and still bears the scars. “You should talk to my brothers about shutting that _koprophagos_ up,” Demeter says, all ice, as if it were that easy to shut out a god, as if it was that easy to turn your back on someone you loved just because they changed, became mad. She wonders if part of Demeter’s irritation at Chronos is her irritation at her child, all grown up but bending more and more underground. Demeter eyes her warily as if she can hear these thoughts.

“Perhaps tomorrow, you should talk to them.” Her daughter adds. A subtle shift, but a noticeable one: Demeter wants her to leave.

“I will return to Olympus on the morrow,” Rhea says; Demeter nods. She has worn out her welcome here; Demeter has come to blame her for the girl’s odd behavior. Speaking of whom, she is suddenly aware of a surprising silence. “Where is your little maiden?” she asks, realizing the wheat-haired girl with slim ankles has disappeared.

“She has been sleeping farther afield lately,” Demeter says, quiet. Unspoken, she can hear blame in her daughter’s words for this choice: _your crying distracts her, and she has hidden herself away_. Rhea doubts this; it is not the girl slipping away to find a grave to sleep in, but rather a woman looking for a place where the sleep of the grave can come to her.

Her suspicions of this deepen when the girl lays low until late morning light, coming up to them with hands muddy, dress torn, hair askew and the painfully obvious blush of womanhood on her face; she offers little more to explain this than flustered excuses. Demeter still buys the obvious lies without comment, and takes them both to Olympus. She drops Rhea off with no great honor, her hand clamped tight around her daughter’s own as they return to their earthly realm.

* * *

 

They miss Hades’ arrival on Olympus by mere seconds.

He arrives as they depart, and only Demeter does not take note of his arrival. Hades storming to Olympus for the first time in centuries is a notable thing. He looks like his father, she thinks, watching him; He’s dressed more finely than usual, looking of his station as a realm-king, bident in hand as either a sign of his rule or a subtle threat to anyone who is going to disagree with him.

His presence on Olympus casts underworld chill through the air, the worlds brushing together in his crossing. She hears Chronos’ cry echo louder on Olympus, and she winces as she hears him: _Rhea Rhea Rhea Rhea Rhea._ She brushes it aside, watching his double-child climb out of the shadows and gloom. Hades brushes falling flowers off his muscular arms and taps his bident as he walks through Olympus unescorted and unchallenged. Who would tell him to put his staff away? She’s seen him kill bigger Gods with it than may well inhabit this realm anymore.

Rhea watches him as he greets Zeus from the corner of her eye; perhaps her sons are more like Iapetus and Chronos than she suspected, for they meet warmly – well, Zeus is warm enough for both of them. Throws his arm around his stone-cold brother as if it’s normal for him to dare to visit, offers him a _xenia-_ invoking gift of ambrosia that Hades clutches with steady hands as he shuts the door behind them. Like her brothers, they keep the door closed on their visits. It’s a short summit; more a notification of intent, she suspects, than any true dowry bargaining. Zeus doesn’t look bothered when Hades leaves. Then again, Zeus has so many daughters, she supposes one little one isn’t so much to give to guarantee a life-long alliance among immortals.

Hades stays only as long as it takes for him to glance about to make sure a certain someone is not there; he does not bother to visit her as she sits upon her throne, nor Demeter’s oft-empty room. She can see his eyes do flicker toward the girl’s field on Nysa. Would he go to her, if she was here? Would she see her impenetrable ice-child crack with a secret grin for his betrothed? It is hard to imagine the man can even smile. He rushes past her when he leaves, face as serene as if he came up to briefly talk of the weather. She doesn’t realize until he’s just drifted past her that he has a lily tucked behind his ear – has he noticed? She is certain he has not.

She reaches out a hand, but freezes, does not quite let it touch his back. The touch of fate on her fingertips feels hot, like guilt.

She watches him go.

He doesn’t bother to glance back at his mother as he departs, though she has been there the whole time.


	3. The Bargain (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Demeter’s wail when her daughter goes for good can nearly undo them all in her grief.

Demeter’s wail when her daughter goes for good can nearly undo them all in her grief. 

Demeter is the one thing that Rhea took for granted in her ruthless calculus; her twin-daughter, like Chronos’ double-son, is different from her, in the end. She clads herself out in full fighting gear when the girl fails to return, looking more like Athena than the _potnia_  Demeter was born to be. It’s been years since she has worn the armor she dons with her sickle, itself long unused for threshing anything but wheat. Does Demeter even know where her daughter is? She searches unceasingly. Without her fertility, the world turns cold. Rhea does not interfere, though she could. But she, too, has known mourning; five seasons of it, in her time. She did not have time to mourn her babies; she will give Demeter time to mourn her daughter. That is what she tells herself, at first.

But all too quickly, Rhea's thoughts sour.

Never did Rhea keep on her mourning vestments so long as this; a month without new growth, then two, then three, four, five and six. Half a year for _one_ stolen child? Rhea scoffs. She is sympathetic, but it isn’t as if Demeter could not simply make another. Zeus will never see her next child sent anywhere after all this fuss.

The mortal world below is suffering, but Zeus and his celestial table try to ride out the madness, playing games of  _petteia_ to pass the time. Zeus gripes to Rhea that all Demeter is doing is providing Hades’ a dowry beyond what he asked for, which was nothing but the girl’s eternal hand. A bargain for a royal marriage between two houses, by all accounts, she thinks. If Hades was as crafty as his mad father, she’d assume it was because he knew this would happen, but then—when has Hades ever had much interest in his sisters’ feelings or his brothers’ rule?

“Did you tell Demeter where she is?” Rhea asks, supping on ambrosia in heaven. Her most handsome son, blessed with her golden brown skin and Chronos’ heavy curls, just laughs.

“As you can see, my brother Hades’ balls haven’t been thrown into the ocean just yet. Why if I told her, what sort of goddess do you think he’d spawn? Grandfather gave us love from his jewels. What unholy terror do you think lurks in Hades’ endless riches?”

 _Hades' potential heirs are nothing to joke about_ , she thinks, wondering whether there is anything of a girl left in Demeter’s child. Perhaps little Persephone has grown into her big name. Perhaps she is with child already; odd to think of a grandchild born in hell with some weak claim toward heaven. She wonders if the little slim-ankled thing misses the sunshine, or if the gloom is what she really wanted, all along. Zeus does not notice either of these possibilities, preferring to crack jokes as to what Demeter may do to his erstwhile brother for despoiling her "stolen" child. She thinks he enjoys this situation; for once, it is not Zeus in the hot seat for stealing a virgin’s grace. But then, Zeus has long ago inherited his father’s poor humor. Even when Zeus was hot at his heels, the war all but lost, her husband Chronos was full of terrible insults and sharp-tongued japes.

The worst part of Demeter’s long and tiresome campaign is that Rhea cannot travel freely to the underworld; the door there is sealed shut against godly entrance, and even knowing that, still she hears the madman’s long and wailing rambling, begging for her: _Rhea, Rhea, Rhea, Rhea, Rhea._ Her skin itches, and there is nothing she can do to save him. The mortals’ souls pass—they have no corporal bodies to tie them down—but that is not an option open to deathless ones unless one is quite willing to never return. 

At the nine-ten-eleven-twelve month marks, no one on Olympus is laughing anymore. Hades and his bride are still comfortable, down below; they are the only ones who get sacrifices now, beyond Demeter. Both of her erstwhile children are prayed to for mercy.  The rest of the gods, humanity has little need for at the moment. Even Zeus’ powers are waning now; grey dots his handsome beard, coldness brews in storm-blue eyes. Hera is in a fouler mood than normal, kicks the _petteia_ game off the table—even more than Zeus, that one has her father’s temper, Rhea thinks. Her headstrong son Poseidon comes to stay, driven out of his ocean home by Demeter’s unrelenting ice; he bellows no more, now. First-born Hestia works her fingers raw preparing dishes to distract with fewer and fewer ingredients: now that the door to the underworld is closed to them, there is no ambrosia to be made and they must ration out supplies. Hephaestus, Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Hermes, and even Ares, her grandchildren who missed the war, murmur together about how the world will end, for want of a girl so obviously born to shadow none of them can quite remember what she looked like.

It’s Hera who finally demands Rhea address the situation; Rhea isn’t surprised. Hera has always been her most decisive daughter. She comes to Rhea's garden of silver firs, looking resplendent, but her daughter, all resigned grace in her hands, is so obvious in her intent. Rhea smiles, privately amused; Zeus is bold, but even he hides behind his wife’s skirts in some matters.

“You must go to Hades or Demeter,” Hera says, plainly. She, too, never calls Rhea _mother_ ; unlike Demeter, Hera has always blamed her mother and father both for her fate. She still remembers Hera, a toddler when she was devoured, calling out to her, chubby hand outstretched. There is _nothing_ of maternal longing in that lithe body now. “I care not which. Just…stop this madness,” She huffs, and Rhea sees ice on her breath.

“And how will I go to an underworld with its doors held shut to us?” Rhea asks, an eyebrow raised. Hades has made his intention quite clear, she thinks; he has found a flower in his hand and he will not let it go.

It is the only thing she has ever understood of him.

“You’ve found a way to communicate your wishes well enough in the past. He—“ Hera purses her lips, her distaste for her own words all too evident. “If he is anything like his brothers, he will tire of his pretty, young thing soon enough and may be glad of your convenience.” There is a long-held bitterness in Hera’s eyes, and Rhea wisely does not travel into that storm.

“He may not wish to give her back,” she says, already knowing he will not. Hades does nothing by half-measures; a decision that is made is made, for eternity. Death does not compromise, and it does not back down.

“Then if he doesn’t, see that Demeter ceases her wailing.” Hera tisks, looks down at nails that were painted in much finer splendor only a few months ago. ”Silence her. I don’t care how.”

There’s something of a chill in the air at that ominous portent.  Rhea stares at her daughter, looking at her in surprise. “Do you wish me to kill my own blood, daughter?”

“You can stand by while Hades does it if you wish. Nothing new for you to be an accomplice to murder, is it?”  Hera smiles with pre-eternal grace, and Rhea feels a chill that radiates throughout her entire being. Hera, like her father, does not and _will_ _not_ forgive. “He even looks the same, doesn’t he? Perhaps he will swallow her up just like—”

“Enough. _Go_ ,” Rhea tells her daughter; there is no grace left in her, she is an old goddess and far too tired. “I will talk to them. But no more than that.”

Hera shrugs her shoulder, her pretty golden cloak slipping down her shoulders. “If you can fix this by talking, by all means.”

Her daughter goes back to her husband, not bothering to look back at her even once. Rhea puts on her heavy cloak, and decides to go to Elysium first. Of the two, she has always found her daughter far easier to talk to.

* * *

“Go,” Demeter says, voice rough, when Rhea is admitted entrance to see her by her newfound acolytes. Her daughter is a grieved and ugly god-thing, all hot tears and cold, cold fury. The human world crunches, dead, under her feet, but the chill brings Demeter no succor.

“I want nothing of your company if you haven’t brought her with you.” Demeter is a mad thing, eyes the color of Rhea’s own but all hard, flinty diamond; like her father, Demeter is full of resentment, and she wields it against every perceived enemy, even her own mother.

“I know where she is,” Rhea says, hoping to barter. They are all crafty in their own ways, her daughters. Demeter, goddess of grain and corn, is no stranger to the necessity and price of information. She expects this to be a carrot held in front of a stubborn mare, but Demeter flares her nostrils and she does not budge.

“We all know where she is. Who she’s with.” She looks at her mother with a curious detachment. “Who put her there.”

Rhea closes her eyes for a moment; unfortunate. She had not wanted her part in this passion play exposed. “It would have happened, regardless. She was always bending back toward the ground, little one.” That is the truth of it there, though she is sure that Demeter will not quite see that yet. 

“You put her hand on the spear and showed her how to make herself bleed.” Demeter snorts. Rhea thinks of where Demeter must have gotten this information, if she is so very confident in it. She must have gone to Helios, off pottering in his old castle, and Rhea feels a sense of betrayal at that old loudmouth. Titan-kin should stick together; Helios has done her dirty, just because it is Apollo who drives his chariot now. As if her son gave Rhea any say before handing the blazing chariot to his golden child!

Demeter punches a statue that she clearly wishes was Rhea, and Rhea flinches. Her daughter's naked fury is hard to deal with. “I blame you more than him. He at least…” Demeter looks away toward the horizon, eyes wet. “He’s been alone a long time.”

“And whose fault is that?” Rhea shrugs. It is no one’s, truthfully; the gods above and the gods below are different things and generally made of different matter. Rare is the upper world god or goddess called below. Hades and Demeter's maiden are unique, in that. “Let him have your little flower. You can make another…and Zeus will not dare to sell this one out from under you, with the cries you are making.”

“You cannot replace one child with another,” Demeter says in a low growl, advancing toward her at a speed that makes Rhea wince. “All these years and you have not learned that, mother?” Rhea closes her eyes, teleports behind her violent child in hopes of slowing Demeter's vitriol, but the life goddess simply whirls, stalking toward her, patient as death itself.

“All children are individuals!” She bellows, almost shrieking. “Don’t you understand that?! You cannot replace one of us with another, like a wheel on a cart, and expect us to canter on at the same speed! Even Hades and Zeus understand this, _mother_. At some level, I think you do too, or you’d have gone to him first and demanded her back for me. Plenty of goddesses he could take to his bed, after all, if my daughter's identity did not matter to him. In fact, if you are so sympathetic to Hades, why not go yourself, mother?” Demeter's eyes look as pitiless as Hades' cool, calculating glances have always been; they are not so different, Rhea thinks. “He looks so much like _him_ that you could just close your eyes and pretend you have your husband back. He’d probably even let you call him by that madman's name. ”

“He deserves a wife who has love in her breast for him.” She shoots her response back too quickly and knows her words are a mistake the moment they leave her lips. Demeter’s eyes widen and Rhea winces. She has said too much and is not sure which is the worse implication: that she does not love her strangest son, or that Demeter’s little maiden loves him dearly.

“And _I_ deserve to have input on my daughter’s fate!” Demeter hisses. “I should be the only important voice, in truth; certainly, Zeus gave her _nothing_ beyond her eyes and her husband. And Hades has given her nothing but his…oh, I cannot even bear to say it! Yet I, who raised her, nurtured her, _loved_ her…Where was my voice in this matter, mother? Where is my daughter’s justice? And for all you all  act as if I am a pain for insisting my voice be heard…who is there to demand her rights, if not me?”

Her daughter's face is truly a wretched thing, scraped raw with anguish, reminding Rhea of nothing so much as the look of despair on this same daughter's face so long ago when Chronos devoured her sister Hestia, Rhea remembers it clearly; her eldest daughter's wet godblood falling upon Demeter's pale hair. Rhea’s heart is wounded by the memory; she pulls her daughter into her arms, around the little girl whose cornsilk hair she used to plait into winding maize-breads once so long ago. Demeter struggles but Rhea holds her tight, tight as she should have done all those many years ago, when instead she stood by and let the girl's father swallow her.

“Do not think I will not have words with him, too, daughter. I see you first, but not only,” she murmurs. “I know this sorrow all too well. And well yet may I persuade him to see your perspective." Rhea refrains from promising too much; she is careful not to promise what she cannot fulfill. she doubts Hades will find much sympathy in Demeter's argument, in truth. More mortals flowing to his door will not aggrieve him. He has now all he ever wanted from the higher worlds.  

Demeter stiffens in her arms and Rhea panics, holding her daughter tighter if only to preserve the baby girl of her memories for one moment more. “Answer me a question, mother,” Demeter murmurs, voice echoing with the deadly portent of the fates and Rhea shivers. “You say you mourned us but…if Zeus had failed, would you let _him_ put a seventh child in you, while our bodies lay bleeding into grandmother Earth? As if we had never lived at all? As if we mattered not?”

Rhea shuts her eyes, winces, refuses to answer. She will not indulge a pointless and painful hypothetical question. Still, she can feel Demeter's anguish, and is aware Demeter knows all-too-well what her answer to such a possibility would be. Demeter pulls back from her mother's arms

“I pity you, mother,” she says flatly, shaking her heard. “I do not think you can _ever_ understand my anger, my sorrow.”

“Let us not waste time bandaging old wounds when there are far fresher to deal with,” Rhea snaps, standing and refusing to flinch though her ancient heart is cracked in twain at hearing Demeter's words; once again she will need to knit together later. Just as with Chronos, every time she wounds herself with her children, it takes longer to heal. She pivots, casts Demeter’s blame to an easier target. ”You wish to discuss your identities as individual children of my brood? Very well, let us discuss your next-born brother. He is by far the wealthiest of us all, and I do not think your _bastard_ daughter could expect better than to marry into a third of the universe. Your grandchildren will be kings and queens of the world beyond. Your case to demand her return on unsuitability is thin, daughter.”

Demeter knows this of course; Rhea can see that in the way her daughter's eyes go down to the ground, as if she could find an answer there. There is no God alive who can outbid Hades in brideprice, though she will not tell Demeter how little Zeus sold her only daughter for. Demeter takes one deep breath, then two; her hands grab at her sickle and Rhea wonders if she plans on using it on her mother or her brother below.

“As I said, it is not _Hades’_ sin I am furious of. He has been alone a long time and I understand his desire for a bride to warm his cold bed and his winterheart.” Demeter stills, examining the blade in her hand. “But that Zeus and _you_ decided it must be _my daughter_ who must suffer under his cold chill…That, mother, is pain beyond compare. So many children you could have given to him…and you gave him _mine_. My _only_ daughter. Without a word to me! Why was I not informed of my daughter’s impending nuptials? Why was I not allowed to give her a mother's advice before she was taken to her marital bed?”

Demeter breaks down, the sound of her blade falling to the ground nearly drowned out by her heavy sobs. “I think of her in Hades’ big hands and how scared she must have been…I knew such pain in my time, mother. I would have spared her of that. You do not know Hades as I do; he was always austere. I cannot imagine any gentleness in his soul in such an act.”

Truthfully, Rhea cannot imagine such either. There is nothing she can say on that front. Her shadow son has always been as grave as stone.

“Regardless, she was always going to be his,” Rhea says, changing topics slightly and pulling Demeter’s shoulder back into an awkward hug. Her double does not shake her off, but neither does she cling to her mother. Rhea debates bringing up the strange little flower’s womanly blush and ripped clothing, but refrains. She suspects it would hurt her worse if Demeter learned that her daughter had crossed from maidenhood to womanhood of her own volition. “You do not see it because you love her so, but I beg you to think of your little one: her dark skirts, her hands and feet in the dirt. You have tried to raise her to embrace life, but oh, daughter, it was always death she wanted. I do not think her unhappy on Hades' iron throne.”

“You do not know my girl.” Demeter shrugs her off her arm, pulling away once more from her mother. “She was always fascinated by life! She would make amazing trellises of vines in the fields, knotty briers beyond compare—"

“Who did she wish to see those trellises and briers, daughter? Brambles dipping downwards, choking the grass underneath?” Rhea shakes her head and sighs. “The first question she asked me was of the world below, my daughter. I showed her how to reach him, but oh Demeter, she was hungry for him long before I put the shoot through her skin.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Demeter hisses; the floor under her feet slips to ice, and Rhea waves her hand, radiating heat. It does not melt. She is too old a goddess, and her powers are too frail without mortal worship to sustain them any longer. "I deserved to know!"

“It was not my place.” She takes a deep breath. She will bend in some ways for Demeter. “In that, I agree, your brothers have been quite negligent. Hades or Zeus should have spoken to you before the marriage compact was seen to.”

But if course, the damage is done now, she thinks. One cannot pretend their daughter is a child after they are grown. The girl is a married wife now; the child she was has surely been torn away as easily as her skirts upon that moor all those months ago. Rhea knew this pain as well, once; when she first saw her five reemerge into the world, full grown and well confused by blinding light, Rhea's first instinct was not one of happiness, but of pain.  She’d known in their hard eyes that she’d lost her babes forever; they were adult daughter and sons, but never would she have memories of their infancy: never would she think of Hades giggling in her arms, of Poseidon's gurgling first steps, of Demeter’s first hesitant words or Hera's clumsy childish scrawl or Hestia's blossoming into a young goddess. They all made their sacrifices in the war. Their childhoods were Rhea's sacrifices. 

“Hades and Zeus have preferred to ice me out. And so ice I will give them. Let them choke on it.” Demeter lets the ice between her fingertips blossom and crack until she hews a rough chair out of it, and sits back on her icy throne with cold finality. Her eyes are just as merciless and set as her brother's eyes are, down below.

“That is your answer?” Rhea closes her eyes. This is unfortunate. She had hoped Demeter would yield. “You wish me to tell your brothers that their choices are to give your daughter back or to die? You realize, of course, dear daughter, that they may choose to annihilate _you_ instead.” After all, there are two other earth goddesses who may take Demeter’s position. If Demeter thinks herself invaluable because of her sacrifices during the war, she will find them forgotten. If Demeter thinks her former lover will take her side over the brother who presents more willing fealty, she will find herself left in the cold. God’s lives are eternal but no more precious to their own kind than any other form of life. They are all prone to ruthless calculus in their own ways and Demeter should know better.

But perhaps she does, for Demeter's lips drip into a snide smile, an expression better suited to her father’s face than her cruel mirror of Rhea's own. “Then I will be reunited with her, won’t I?” She shrugs, a long lithe movement of her dark shoulders looking all the more stark against the harshness of the ice at her back. “Whether I am reunited with my daughter as shade or living soul, as villainess or heroine…matters little to me. Her touch will be my only succor, as yours is for _him_.”

The blaze of the self-righteous burns in her daughter's eyes and Rhea sighs once more, shoulders feeling all the heavier with the weight of new-found guilt. No, she has badly miscalculated in her calculus with her double-child and now she has only one possible play, a poisoned blade she must wield but does not wish to. “Have you considered, Demeter, that your daughter may not wish to be parted from  her now-husband?”

Demeter closes her eyes for a long moment; the ice spills forth from her hands and Rhea shudders, her sandals soaked through by frost. “If that is the case…” Demeter opens her eyes and nothing escapes them, for she is all-consuming in her sorrow. “I will hear her tell me so herself.”

“I will pass along your message, but I cannot protect you should they stand against you, daughter,” Rhea says, already feeling like this entire mess has only sunk further into a quagmire. Hera is perhaps right. Talking may not solve this. 

“I would never expect _you_ to defend either of _us_ ,” Demeter says, voice as cold as the earth. Rhea ignores the slight. Instead, she gathers her heavy cloak around her shoulders and walks away, and does not turn back to look at her daughters’ icy grip as she feels it tighten on the world beneath her sandals.

She stalks forward towards the door to the underworld instead, moving with a goddess' speed over a land devastated by ice and snow and the dead ground below it. She will ask for entrance and pray that Hades may allow her such. If not, well… She supposes it will not matter. One way or another, she will see her shadow-son soon enough, either as a visitor or a shade come to join his populous domain.

Rhea feels her madman's cry as she steps up to the doorway to the underworld, knocking on the heavy stone seal with all the god-strength she has left in her fingertips. _RHEA RHEA RHEA RHEA RHEA RHEA_ , her madman screams; he feels she is close. She feels his agony as her own and yet: she can do nothing but wait.

And so, she waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuing readers may note that this is not the end chapter as I thought it would be. Surprise! It turns out this wanted to get even longer. Rhea's confrontation with Hades will be in the next chapter.


	4. The Bargain (II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They stand together, two old and miserable gods, both looking at the dead land of the living above from the verdant underworld.

She almost gives up hope waiting. Hades has always known her wishes and has supplied himself when needed; now, waiting at his door, there is no chariot, no strange ghost-child come to great her.  She is alone, feels the discomforting chill of Demeter’s freeze, of Chronos’ suffering, of Hades' indifference. She shivers, half-wondering if Hades intends to wait until she falls into her final sleep, to collect her as a servant rather than an equal.

She almost –  _almost_  – goes back to Olympus to let her youngest boy and girl know her second and fourth born will not yield. But that, she knows, is not truly an option; if she fails, they will blame her. Goddesses are only useful as long as they bear results, and she has never been weaker than she is now. It would be preferable to die trying to reach her hard-hearted shadow-son than see her favorite’s eyes go black and cold as he shoves in the knife.

At least she has always known Hades to be heartless. 

She closes her eyes, feels herself starting to fade. What would it be to die, to be a shade? Would she feel differently about her shadow boy, if he were to become her king? She feels lightheaded, old; her powers are almost spent and she nearly falls against the door.  _Hades_ , she thinks.  _My_   _son_.  _Please. Show mercy to me, as I have shown it to you._

And at that thought, the door opens. Just a crack, but it is enough; Rhea sticks her fingertips inside, desperate. It is not Hades on the other side, she realizes, as it swings open. It is one of her own kind, or close enough to it; a cousin, monstrously tall and bent from thousands of years of rowing from one shore to the next. Charon stares at her, eyes warm but guarded. Has Hades told him to bar the door? She is sure he has.

“The master doesn’t want any of the new gods comin' in,” Charon murmurs, her cousin stroking his long and scraggly beard. “He's worried that they'll try to take our new little flower. But…he’s  a young ‘un, by our standards, and I wonder if he perhaps makes his orders a bit too wide-reaching, Queen Rhea of the Heavens and the Earth.”

“I did not come to steal from the lord of the dead while I stand at his own doorway!” She tries to summon a strength she does not feel, leaning against a frost covered stone that will spell respite or doom. “I have only come for a visit, nothing more.”

“We owe loyalty to one another, you and I. My parents were night and cloud, yours sky and ground - we are cut from the same cloth, our kind, and him too…You are our lord's lady mother, after all.” She stands, moves closer to the heat of the doorway, but Charon does not step aside. She holds out a hand, but he does not take it. All too quickly she understands: this is a test. Prove her fealty.

“Charon, how long have we known one another?” She sighs. “I fought a war against my own husband for Hades, as did you.”

“Loyalties can change,” he says. “Was a time we both served his dah. Was a time your boy that sits upon the iron throne now was king of heaven. You understand my concern, I think.” His eyes are warm pools and in many ways, that’s worse. She does not want his pity. “I’ve always been soft on you, Queen Rhea. But your boy has been good to us down here and I’ll not stand for anyone coming to break his heart. He's been deprived enough.”

The message is clear:  _My loyalty lies with the young master, not the old._

“Do you think me so fickle?” Perhaps this is her fate now; to be the outsider, eternally, to a family she has sacrificed everything precious to her to save, to have even cousins doubt her word as genuine. She is so weak now, shivering in the doorway, that she doubts she could fight her son even if she wished to. “I  _introduced_  him to that girl, Charon. I have only come to talk to them both.”

“I’m just makin’ sure we’re of an accord,” he says, stepping backward and cocking his head. “Come inside. I will tell Hades of your arrival.”

“Thank you,” she says, sighing in relief as she steps through and Charon pulls the door shut.

“As I said, we early ones should stand together.” He taps her shoulder, hesitating; she realizes, suddenly, that the underworld feels almost warm in comparison to the world outside. “And if I were a Titaness, I would remember who  _those fates_ made the Titan's _king_.” The hand on her shoulder squeezes in a warning, and then he is gone, shuffling back down to his old boat. She hears him push off on his oars and realizes that she is on her own.

* * *

She takes her time walking to the shores, exploring the shores of Lethe as she debates what to say. It is a subtly different place than the last time she came; the sand of the Lethe is softer, the waves lapping gently. Charon avoids looking at her, keeps busy moving this group of shades from one side of the shore to another. Demeter has assured there is no fewer waiting for the next trip, though it will be delayed by Charon reporting in on her now. She sighs, wondering; ....what is she to say to Hades?  _I have given you the girl, but you must give her back_ ; it would be a hard sell on Hestia, her most selfless child. For Hades? No, he will not agree. He will have decided he has taken the girl legally, and she has no doubt he has: Hades is a land and a king of rules. Fair to the point of impartiality and severe in his judgment. Wise, but _not_ merciful, her boy. 

This is his line in the sand, she suspects; he has waited many years deferring to take a stand and now he has found his war.

She has only two true options, neither great: to engender him to her breast and make him feel a filial son's guilt (but then, doubt whispers, _when has Hades ever been moved by emotional appeals_?), or to come at him with the blaze of Zeus' fire, and hope he blinks (but then, doubt again: _when has Hades ever been a coward_?). It is hard to tell which would be more effective; Hades performs the motions of a good son but rarely has he been as challenged as much as she will ask of him now.

There is a splash upon the water, and she finds to her surprise that the man that comes to the shoreline now is not Charon but her son himself, his mouth in its usual steady line. His bident is in his hand, his celestial crown on his head. He does not bother to use it, but that he bears a weapon and the mark of his station at all suggests he is on edge. His eyes are heavy, his face as severe as it was when she last left him; his back is slightly bent, seemingly full of all the weight of the world. 

“Hades,” she says. She expects marriage will have changed him like it has changed his realm, that he will be somehow easier to understand, more gentle. She expects he will keep his little flower with him, expects to find her strange cornflower blue eyes peeking out from the side of his robes. But…he is alone; his face, his usual blank façade. He reveals nothing. 

“What brings you to my shores, Rhea of the Heavens?” His words are clarion clear and his hands are carefully still, armed but not aggressive.

“I am Rhea of the Earth," she says, claiming his horrible lands as her own; it is not a lie for her heart dwells here, truly, trapped eternally in Tartarus. Hades the King stands a little straighter in response, the light catching his rarely worn black crown. Never has he bothered to wear a crown on her visits before. Strange onyx lilies dot the corners of his black crown, are they new? She gets up on her tiptoes to touch one. Like him, they are cold, hard. He does not bend down to help her though he is tall. She grabs his chin, forces herself to smile up at him in hopes of setting him at ease. “I am your mother, Hades. As you are my son, Hades of the Earth, grandson of Earth and Sky.”

He pulls away from her touch and her heart quails, but then he sighs and shakes his head; he holds out his hand, a simple gesture but a welcome one. She takes it. “You did not answer my question as to your objective here, Rhea who claims many homes.”

She looks up, startled by the subtle rejection; his eyes give away nothing.  Rhea swears a curse that she buries in her mind; her shadow-son is too much like his sister, holding old grudges close to his chest, despite all his talk of laws and rights. He could not be more different from sister her in their means of inflecting devastation, however; Demeter is an earthquake, rumbling her wrath until the whole world vibrates with it, while Hades is a sinkhole, letting you feel yourself compress to a single point of painful instant. Both effective, in their own ways.

“You  _know_  why.” They stand on the bow of his boat, both taking the measure of the other. “I’ve not come to take to your house like a thief in the night, Hades. I am here to talk, nothing else.”

He takes a step back with a short bow, allows her to finish boarding. He points his bident to the other end of the shore, letting his power guide her forward instead of his usual rowing arm. It is a blatant show of power; a reminder to her that he owns all that lies under the ground. Including her husband. Including _her_ , now. 

“It is…unusual,” he says after several moments where nothing breaks their silence but the lap of the foaming waves of the Lethe crackling upon the two boats crossing its shores.

“What is?”

“That you should wish to talk to me,” he murmurs. He says it with no emotion in his voice, and does not react when she winces. They ride the rest of the way in silence; what can she say? It is true. Rhea stares off into the distance, where the Lethe meets the Phlegethon; the river of fire calls to her like a torch-light in the distance.

It is not the only thing that calls her. She shivers as her madman calls to her, his fervency louder; he knows she is here. _Rhea! Rhea! Rhea! Rhea! Rhea!_ , her madman cries; she does not dare to ask Hades if he hears it, too. She does not ask to see him, for she does not have the strength, though she is sure that he would allow her.

Her strange shadow son has always been patient with her, after all, if nothing more to her than that.

She does not see Demeter’s little flower on the other side of the Lethe: not a good sign. If he is hiding her from view, he is possessive of his new little bud, and his tight fist will not part, even if it crushes the flower lying within. She will have to be careful in how she unwinds his fingers; as if he can read that thought, he gathers her off of his boat gently but firmly, his broad arm encircling her own in a tight embrace.

He does not tell her where he’s taking her, but simply turns, taking her away from the sand of his beach and turning toward his city. Hundreds of souls shudder as they turn to look at them – but he ignores the looks. The king is used to such, she suspects. Most souls do not look at them for long, inevitably turning and running toward the fields beyond the beaches. Do the mortals normally drive themselves so desperately to their final justice? She does not remember, spoiled by millenniums of taking a more direct route to the king’s castle.

“I suppose I should congratulate you,” she says quietly, leaking just a slight edge to her voice as they stroll down the docks long steps. “On your nuptials.”

“Thank you,” he says, his lips drawn into a thin line. Is it a smile? A grimace? She does not know, never held him long enough as a child to know, intimately, all the little expressions his face can make. She cannot try if she is successful in riling him or not; there is not a hitch to his steps as he all but marches her into the fields of asphodel, and she sucks in a harsh breath as she sees the changes her granddaughter has brought to the underworld.

What was once a plain grey field has exploded in color; blossoms of countless varieties of fruit and flora glide through the murky shadow soil, laying deep roots; shapeless souls dive toward the ground, toward newly wooded treats. Bellies left empty in life are sated in the underworld's newfound bounty.

“Did she…?” She stares out in shock. Uncle Iapetus would never allow such coddling, and, in truth, she thought Hades beyond such fiddling. He nods but does not smile, does not offer explanations. Rhea watches a child soul bite into an underworld tomato, unnaturally vivid red juice running down its chin. It smiles, and Rhea looks away.

Hades never looks away from his path, never deviates. He takes her through his city next, no less changed; torches that burn without smoke light his dusty homeland enough that even those born without a god’s sight can see the new grass that litters his new walkways; new gardens and fountains that bubble throughout the city of Dis. Souls linger in his streets, whispering as they pass.

Hades’ city, occupied at last. It is an odd thing, fundamentally wrong to everything that Rhea has ever known the underworld to be. His citizens watch with curiosity as the two Gods among them move, arm in arm.

 _Theos kai Theia…Theos kai Theia_ … they whisper, with awe for Hades equal to that which they once spoke of Rhea. Many souls bow toward her shadow son, who does not return it, keeping his eyes on his castle beyond. That, at least, seems mostly the same, though there is something different there she can’t quite put her fingers on it. It is the same obsidian monolith she remembers, full of strange curves and sloping steps.

“You have remade an ancient place,” she says, unsure if she approves or not. It is clear that his many millions of subjects enjoy the changes, but it feels wrong, she thinks. The underworld is a holy place, a sacred realm, and a mostly static one.

It was never meant to be anything so…lively.

“Things change,” her son murmurs, then helps her up the steps, patiently waiting when she needs to rest for a moment. Dutiful if only just; his eyes already look upwards, no doubt focusing on the little flower-wife he hid away. His hand on her arm is tight.

“I know my way through your home, my son,” she murmurs; his arm does not fall from her own. If anything, it tightens. He will not let her go. Perhaps Zeus long-held suspicion is finally coming through and she’ll be led to her husband’s bed upon Tartarus' shore and nailed to it at long last today. It scares her that there is a long-buried part of her that longs for him to nail her to that final cross. In some ways, that hell would be easier to deal with.

* * *

 

She is not expecting more changes, but they are there for her anyway inside Hades’ castle.

She stares at the halls of the dead; the décor here has changed, like everything else. Flowing trellises of silver and white blooms blossom from the ceiling, thick knotted vines that line windows that look out onto verdant corridors. Windows! Her mouth falls open as it finally clicks to her to the difference she’s missed: windows! So many windows!

She gasps softly, realizing; the little thing has not only changed the underworld, but its ruler with it. He had brought the little thing to the underworld, but she has taken her understanding of the human world with her. She glances at her boy, wondering: what was this, to him? A revelation? Did the little one dazzle him with knowledge never known? Or does he merely put up with it? Has he done this simply to appease her tastes, to make a fun-house mirror of the world above that she can lose herself in, and the only exit is the living death-god himself?

As if he can read her turmoil, Hades just looks coolly forward, revealing nothing of his own emotions.

She looks up at the end of the hall and realizes with a heavy heart where he’s taking her: to his throne room. That he treats this as a state visit rather than a familial one is telling, and not a good sign for her negotiations. Never has he insisted on receiving her in his official stateroom; always before, he took her to his private chambers, or to her own room. It appears that he believes she has lost her claim to such.

This will not end well, she knows.

The answer to Demeter’s ultimatum is all too clear in the girls own handwriting: the little thing has become  _potnia_  in her own right, mistress of the eternal estate. Hades will not let her go; how could he? He has all but wedded his realm to her, asphodel and lilies spread over almost every wall of his stone.

She has never seen a god’s realm so intermingled with their spouses. And there are _reasons_ for that.

Hades opens the door to the throne room with a bang and shoves her gently inward; she stands in the center of it, taking in the unfamiliar room. Silver flowers blossom around the walls, grey slate made more alive with a strange glow of life in the house of death. He leaves her there, moving up grey marble steps to sit upon a black onyx throne. A newer hewn thing sits next to him, a chair in delicate silver with flowers of dozens of crystal flowers etched carefully in it. Hephaestus, she thinks, would be jealous of Hades' handiwork; Hera, perhaps, too, who never had a chair less than three feet below her husband’s. Her oldest son has deliberately made the twinned thrones stand together.

Rhea stands in silence for a long moment, arms folded carefully into her sleeves as she waits for Hades to begin this formal meeting.

But he doesn’t; the bident he puts next to the throne, and then he leans forward, waiting patiently for her to speak. For a moment they stare at one another and Rhea almost laughs; Chronos would never allow a guest to have the first word.

Eventually, Hades doesn’t either. After a moment, he sighs and waves a hand. “You’ve brought word from my fickle-hearted brother, no doubt. I will hear it.”

She shakes her head, refuses to take the bait. Talk of Zeus early will only hurt her chances as a whole. Hades is not wrong in his perception of his brother’s nature. “How are you, Hades? Your halls have flourished verdantly.”

“A credit to my wife, though do not feel you need waste time enquiring as to me and mine. That is not your purpose here.”

“And your wife?” She ignores the slight chill in his voice and brushes imaginary pollen from her sleeves. “Is she hale and happy?”

“Very.” A defensive, instant answer; oh yes, he is scrambling for a fight. The little flower is held tensely indeed, and she must unwind his fingers without snapping them. She does not want to break either of them, truth told.

“I was surprised not to see her.” She circles her hands around her, gesturing to Hades' newfound botanical riches. “This is a stunning array. I should like to compliment her on them.”

Hades smiles, shakes his head. Too clever to fall for that. “I will pass along your compliments to her.”

“Hades.” She sighs. “Why are you so shy of showing off your little bride?” There are only two reasons she can think of; the little flower is either pregnant or has recently given the king an heir, and he does not wish the family to know of that new-found vulnerability — or he is strictly controlling what information reaches her ears. She is young enough to be naïve to a man’s manipulation, though she would not have thought Hades would sink to such. He is rarely a liar.

“I think your presence may upset her. As her husband, I would prefer her not to be distressed. ” His voice is slightly quieter; his face, still expressionless, but is it her imagination or does he have a hint of softness to his eyes? Or is that merely the heavy mantle of his kingship falling on him?

“I do not wish to distress her or take her from your home. Only to see her, so that I can enjoy her company.” She bows low, faking fealty. “I understand you are protective, but you are not her father, Hades. Let her choose who she sees. Will you at least consider asking if she would like to see me?”

“I will take it under advisement.” He waves a hand and sighs. He is tired, her oldest boy; so tired. She wonders if he has had to work so hard thanks to Demeter’s recent gifts to him, or if it is the bed-tax of being an older man in a relationship with a younger woman that tires him so, or perhaps some other issue weighing upon the iron crown unknown to those above. “We will have time for personal discussion later. First, I must know what my brother in the sky above dares to  _think_  he can dictate to his brother in the earth below.”

Like a stick in the mud, this one.

“I do not wish to talk of Zeus just yet.” She tries to pivot the question back to his flower bride, but Hades will not let her. He shakes his head, holds up his hand to stop her before the question has even been given breath in her mouth.

“State affairs before personal ones. As it must be.” His lips quirk up, impersonal but vicious. “Some of us still remember that Gods are beholden to our own laws. Do you know what is the first rule written here, the first rule pressed into me by grandmother Gaia when I became ruler of the underworld, all those years ago?”

“Hades…” She sighs; she knows it well. Gaia was her mother, after all. As she is his. 

“Sacred justice,” he hisses. “ _Sacred_  justice. That’s _my_ purview.  _I_ have become the way for the forsaken mortals your kind in the sky plays with and forgets.  _I_ am the one that mortals call the  _eternal_  sorrow because I am with them _always_. _I_ am this land’s architect. And there is nothing here but  _justice_. Justice for  _all._ ” He stands to his full height, eyes alight with a terrible fire. It is not only Demeter who is self-righteous. “I must be ruler before I am husband, king before I am man. My brother has forgotten that, I suspect, but…His realm is for a moment. Mine is forever. Which makes any accusation of impropriety on my part all the more laughable.”

She stares at him, eyes hard. This is the argument she suspected he would cling to, and to succeed at all, she will have to make the king remember he is a man. “A relationship is not a thing bound by inviolable laws, Hades.”

“Why not? What is a marriage but a contract?” He glances up through his ceiling as if Zeus is staring down from all those strata above. “You brought her to me and I returned her affections. I offered my hand and she took it. I asked her father for permission and he gave it. She became part of my home and I became part of hers. As you can see, the realm flourishes. Justly, for no evil was here committed.”

“And yet you are so tired, my boy.” She moves one step toward him and is surprised to see him lean back on his throne – is he frightened of her? He is stiller than Demeter in his anger toward her but no less wary. “Why are you strained, if this is so  _just_?”

“Because my childish sister  _demands_  her daughter remain a child forever and dares hold the world hostage for her impossible demand. Let us call a spade a spade, mother: I know you all will back her ridiculous demands long before you back my perfectly valid claim. Olympians care no more for justice than Titans; you all take too short a view and you see me as little more than a garbage disposal, sweeping your detritus away.”

“Hades…” She sighs. “I understand you have feelings for the girl, as does Zeus. It is not that we think you an unfit husband —“

“And yet…” He raises a finger. “You will tell me I must return her to Demeter, though you must realize at this point doing such would not only harm me, but Persephone, too.” He says her name softly, warmly. The only thing warm in his cold logic; she notes it. “Who would have her after me?”

It is true, she knows; there are plenty of virgins on Olympus, or at least women who are good at playing coquettes. None of them have had death in their wombs — but the girl has. And everyone will know it. And no one will touch her for fear of it. No, the little one will never remarry; could not remarry. And she is not entirely sure, looking at this enormous display of god-love inherent in every step of the realm — that the girl would want to. The girl is not the sacrificial lamb Rhea once pegged her to be.

“I do not deny they asked if you would return her. I did not guarantee you would, either. I understand you cannot give back what has been taken, though I am sure Zeus will try to demand you pay some sort of recompense for taking her maidenhead down here if she leaves your side.” Zeus is clever enough to always press an advantage, and Hades has enough wealth to pay whatever Zeus demands to set up his little flower with a comfortable — if not entirely happy — life.

“Fortuitous for me, then, that she wasn’t a virgin when she came here,” he says dryly, under his breath. There’s no pride in that face for what he has obviously done; no pity, no relish. No, he is not like his father at all. “Though I do not find myself of a mind to pay any of Zeus’ ransom for a daughter he has already given me, nor do I find in myself _any_ desire to give her back to him.”

“Hades!” She purses her lips together, though, in truth, it is feigned shock. She has known since the girl came back to them that last morning in the fields.

“You could have stopped me or contested me at any point, I made no secret of my courting.” He takes a step down from his throne, his finger pointed upwards, naked fury on his face. “Does Zeus wish to know how I took her maidenhead,  _mother_? Is that all he concerns himself with his daughters, the state of their quim? It is certainly how he treats the children's mothers. Very well, I will tell it to you, and you can report back to him if he isn’t listening to you do his dirty work right now. I was  _so_  careful with her in taking her maidenhood, mother. I took her in her element, in her own time; I made sure she wanted  _me_ , that she enjoyed every moment of our union. She came into womanhood with my name bursting joyfully from her lips, which frankly is more than  _either_  of my brothers ever did for her mother, or my father ever did for you. Yet you dare to tell me I am unfit as a husband while  _they_  are stalwarts of your will?”

“She is very young, Hades.” She says with gentle criticism; she flicks her eyes over to the girl’s throne, all delicate vines made of silver. That was not quick hewn; how quickly did he start on it, she wonders? Was it inspired from that very first shoot that touched him? “Not to say that her feelings are not genuine, but how can you think she knows what she will want for the rest of her life  _now_? Youth is fickle. She is barely grown.”

“That is an unfair standard; how can any god marry if a requirement is to know what we will want at the end of time? We are not omniscient; we can only act on what we know at the present moment, and as a _grown woman_ , surely she has knowledge enough to consent to what she wishes. She was an adult when I laid her in that field, and an adult when I asked for her hand, and remains an adult today, a happy wife in her husband's estate _. Nothing_  was taken from her without her consent and knowledge.” His eyes are cruel and miss nothing in his appraisal as he pokes about for weaknesses in her argument. His eyes are his father’s, she realizes with cold horror; greedy and demanding and all-consuming. His mouth is drawn into a battle line that makes Rhea all the more willing to dig in her heels.

“Will you really let her go if, one day, she regrets her choice? If your little flower wilts?” She folds her hands into her robes, returns his frightful stare with her own. Let him remember she was queen of heaven _first_. “Someday, she may view your tender arms as a cage. And you are a far older god than her, and what you have been given by the fates is more powerful than her gifts. She cannot expect to win in any fight.”

“She is not bound here by anything but love.” He holds his hands open to her, a shrug on his shoulders, and then he looks away. “I have not forced her into any allegiance; I have not bound her to the Underworld.” There is no answer to her question in his words; she suspects her son, like her, declines to answer questions that hurt his argument. No, he will never let his beloved little flower go; perhaps he cannot do so any more than she can abandon her own beloved. Before she can press him on this point, he abruptly whirls toward her, going on the offensive.

“Tell me, this parental concern…Did you ask these questions of Zeus and Hera? And if so, before or after he hung her upon a golden filament for  _months_  for daring to question his ability to lead?” He takes a deep breath and stares her down, eyes crazed with his own vengeance. “Did you know I came to see her, mother? Your other sons and daughters abandoned her for her supposed perfidy, but Zeus’ ruling was unjust and those cravens hid from her out of fear. Only _I_ remembered the duty we owe one another. I fed her ambrosia, gave her drink, and cleaned her sweat. Offered her shelter in the underworld, even, knowing what that would do to my relationship with Zeus and yet still — I am deficient to you, compared to your golden son?”

 _Yes,_ she nearly says. There is a reason, Rhea thinks, Hera did not take up that offer. Zeus may be cruel at points but punishment at his hand is not eternal. Hades and his rules take the very, _very_ long view; he does not bend his rules, does not break them. If he had put Hera up on her chains, she would be there still, for his laws would demand it. Her boy does not understand measures running anything less than eternity.

“I do not approve of every little thing my son has done,” she says, waving her hands. They have rambled dangerously off topic and she will have to bring things back to their right point. “ _Any_  of my sons, for that matter. This is not about Zeus, nor Hera. This is about  _you_  and your little captive. You wish for me to spell out the injustice of your actions? You are  _killing the world above_ , Hades, and upsetting the balance of power in favor of your own kingdom. Hera, for all her cleverness and schemes, did not do such colossal damage in her entire life as you have at this very moment. You dare to talk of your brothers being blind to the injustice of their own laws? You are murdering the world for little more than your own selfish desire.”

It is a heavy charge to accuse him of what she has, and yet he stands, motionless, for a long moment; his face falls for half a second and then his shields slam back, bringing him to the careful expressionless look he so often cultivates. Then, Hades’ heavy bident appears in his hands and Rhea slinks back a few steps; does he mean to fight her? She does not wish to harm her own son, no matter how strange he is to her. He uses it as a walking stick, pacing down the steps until he joins her at the audience level. The heavy  _thunk, thunk, thunk_  of it hitting the steps may as well be her own thoughts.

“I am  _not_  guilty of any wrong! I have done nothing to cause this beyond marrying a goddess I  _love_ ,” he pouts, the words falling with gravity. He says this like it is an official announcement and she does not doubt he means it. Before she saw this strange new underworld, she had wondered if he was capable of love. Now she knows he is, and desperate to hold onto it.

“It is Demeter who you should find fault with, not me,” he says, walking past her. His pace is quick, tense. His words deflect responsibility, but the anxiety evident in his pacing suggests that guilt chases at his heels as much as it does hers. “Tell her to stop this madness.”

“It is not madness.” Rhea sighs. “It is hard for a mother to lose her child, Hades.”

“Is it? I do not recall you being so torn up about it,” he murmurs; he does not look at her for this insult, and she, too, looks away, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing he has wounded her.

“You could have ended this without a single soul coming to me. Yet, you have not. Are your powers so weakened you cannot combat her freeze? Or is it just that you find satisfaction in watching us turn and devour one another as  _he_  did once, so long ago?”

“Hades —“ She reaches out to grab his arm, but he thrusts it away, glaring, continuing to pace. Compared to his normal stillness, his sudden motion feels like an enormous sea-change. She does not know how to approach this Hades, who clings to his laws but clearly, all too clearly, is uncomfortable with the emotions that bubble under the surface.   “I will not deprive my daughter of her wailing-time. It is true I did not change things to winter’s breath with your loss, but I have known her sorrow. What would your little wife think if you told her that her mother chokes the world and brings her endless dead?”  
  
This argument is a risk, but one Rhea has to take. The girl isn’t here, and she has seen no proof of the existence of Hades’ heir; she will gamble that it is the truth that Hades fears his wife knowing just what her husband allows to pass. She knows by his reaction that her wager has come up short again, however. His mouth bursts into a bright-red smile, all bitter pomegranates and vinegar-wine.

“Do you think I have hidden Demeter’s anger from her? I have not. She knows. She is not happy about it, perhaps, but not so unhappy as to leave my bed.”   
  
“She may not feel she has a choice but to be in that bed, Hades! You are the master of these lands, and I doubt she thinks that you’ll let her go any more than I do.” Certainly, Rhea knew that feeling, once, long ago; she loved her husband, yes, but she also knew better than to ever confront him until she was sure she could survive betraying him. Better to play the obsequious wife than the martyr.

She has always been a survivor, in her own way.

“I have told you the truth of us! Why do you insist I am forcing a scared virgin into my bed?!” Hades is all thunder now, his voice booming through his halls. His laws are tumbling down; she wonders if the little flower can hear him talk of such sacred spaces and if she feels embarrassed of it. “Know well, mother: from the first day she has come to me in  _my_ bed, by  _her own choice_. Our bed is a gentle one; she had never bled for me, never known the pain of an unwanted coupling. Which is more than I can say for  _your_  marriage bed.” His mouth curls in distaste. “Father took you screaming  _your_  wedding night and yet you come without fail to see him, to cure his pains, to beg for his succor from me. I resist her until she asks for me to be hers and hers alone, and then and only then do I agree to wife her and I…” He shakes his head slightly, a bitter smile on his face. “I am the one that you accuse of being a rapist?”

“You know nothing of my marriage,” she bristles; the earth underneath them sways with their mood, though she isn’t sure which of them is more upset and causing her mother to flex so. She feels off balance with this Hades; where is her strange, emotionless boy? This is a different man, both more familiar and more terrifying. Still he clings to his laws but they are slipping, and this boy – oh he has emotions. 

And they run  _deep_.

“You know nothing of mine!” Her taciturn son shouts, and yes, there is his father in him, at long last: all mad-eyed possession. She’s seen that face before; jaw wide open as if he will devour the world with it. He paces and she moves with him, circling in territorial wariness. “I know more than you think, mother! You are not the only one who hears his cries! And believe me, he  _does_  talk to me!” He raises his arm for a moment and she hears her madman:  _Hades, first devoured, first reviled, break these bonds! Unworthy cur! Poisonous child, turned her against me_.  _Perhaps when I am free I will do the same for your little wife, oh yes, time sees her, Hades, do not think I will spare her from your sorrow…_

“It’s not the same situation,” she whispers; the hatred in Chronos’ voice makes her twist with an ancient pain she cannot bear to examine. “Hades, _please_.”

His arm drops, a mercy; the voice is quiet. The son is still furious, his eyes lit with fire brighter than any fire-river. His control has all but collapsed.

“You’re right. Her situation is far better than Hera’s or Amphitrite’s or  _yours_  ever was.” He jabs his finger at her at each word, as if he could spear her through verbal jousts. “I have promised her my fidelity, my realm, my  _worship_. She is my equal and my mate; her reverence here no lesser than my own. Though as usual, I am tried and found wanting based on pure, vulgar emotion. I have emotions, too, mother, but somehow I am able to see beyond them!”

“Hades!” She raises a hand, annoyed. He is not seeing very well beyond them _now_. She wanted to remind him he was a man, not only a king, but she needs him to be in control, not lashing out at every old grudge and wound. “Enough. Do not forget I am your mother and am owed respect by your own precious laws!"

 “No.” His eyes flicker over her carefully and he sighs. “Mother: Have I not always given you the filial piety you were owed, indulged your desires whenever I could, regardless of the cost to me? Yet you thumb your nose to me. You taunt me by questioning my judgments; you cry in my home and refuse my comfort. You give me a wife and threaten to take her away. And then you  _demand_  respect. What respect have you given  _me_?”

“You are my son. My  _eldest_  son. I have never denied you your birthright.” The ground rumbles under her feet, and he unleashes a heavy hiss. The look on his face is pain itself; his brows so heavily furrowed to almost over-shadow his gimlet eyes, his mouth in an ugly grimace.

“Haven’t you? When I was born,  _you_  let  _him_  devour me.  _You_  supported Zeus’ ludicrous idea of drawing lots and what way could that have gone for me but to lose?  _You_ smiled as I was brought here; I, who suffered longest in father’s hell, was sent down to guard the lot of those who I was prophesied to rule. I thought perhaps when  _you_  brought her to me, that it was perhaps the first sign that…that perhaps you cared for me, that you wanted  _my_ happiness, and _hers_.”

He walks up to the girl’s throne, his hand just lightly caressing the back of the chair. “Persephone, she…she is _like_ me. _Called_ like me. You _know_ how rare that is, for a God above to become a God below. You saw it in us both; the call, the _need_.  And she is more than that; she is...dazzling. Radiant. How could I resist her? Or her, me? And now that I love her and am happy in my place at long last, you tell me that I am ruining the world for it…that my love is unjust. Selfish. For all my laws I cannot — she is too much to lose, mother. Why must my happiness be Demeter’s undoing? Why must my marital bed be made on tears? Why must you demand I let her go when I have never wanted anything more in my life than to have her by my side? Is it my happiness that is unjust? Am I made, by our own rules, to suffer?” His beard trembles and Rhea takes the steps to reach out an arm to touch him. He paused and she stares at his face, wide and miserable.

A moment passes between them without words spoken. For Demeter, she could embrace her little girl effortlessly, but this boy…she did not have a childhood to share with this boy-child, swallowed upon his birth. It is harder to cross the bridges between them. She cannot quite make herself go the full way, to pull him into her arms, but she opens her arms to him and he crosses that last step himself.

He son falls into her, this big, strange ghost-child who is full-grown but never was a child. He is big and heavy, as tall as his father, but he breaks against her, the king broken into just a man. She feels his tears wet her shoulders and is startled; she did not imagine him breaking quite like this. His father would _never_. But perhaps it is past the time for comparisons between them. What he did not get from Chronos, he got from her, after all. She is his mother. And though it feels strange, she comforts her lost son. For a moment she strokes his long, black hair as he sobs in heavy gulps, broken, on her shoulder. “Why did you do this to me? Why make my birthright heaven and give me hell? Why make me feel for her and then tell me it is wrong to do so? What injustice did I ever commit to have you hurt me so, mama?”  

Have any of her swallowed children ever called her such? She shivers. The child-name for a long-gone mother is too odd in his deep, rumbling voice for her to feel honor in its invocation. He is too big to hold easily, this adult son — she has lost the little boy, as long ago as she lost Demeter. But it is not, truly, his fault. “Hades…” She says with a sigh. “You and your rules. Sometimes, there is no injustice. Some things simply _are_ and _are not_.”

“Then why am I so often punished?” He is slipping into self-pitying, which is too dangerous an emotion to allow. She wiggles away from his miserable arms. He looks no less haunted at an arm’s distance. “Why must I suffer to lose again, and again, and again? You smiled. You  _smiled._ You smile still and yet my story is the same.  _Lose, lose, lose._ I live according to the rules of our people, punish and promote mortals based on them, and yet: What justice is in this for me? What justice, mama?”

She bits her lip; it is a hard thing to say. She does not remember smiling. She does not remember being glad of Hades’ departure, only being happy that Zeus drew what she felt he had earned. It is a long-ago history. She pulls away first, her boy’s eyes bearing hard on hers.

“If I smiled long ago, it is because I knew you were well matched for what you drew, my son.” That is not entirely the truth, but it is not entirely a lie either. Hades is very patient, and, if not kind, he is fair; he has been a conscientious king of a delicate realm. “If the fates were to decree you holding heaven, you would hold it. All you had to do was refuse the game, Hades.”

And in that moment, she sees his face harden, and realizes she truly has lost him. He jerks back from her arms, as if she has pierced him with his own bident.

“Don’t you see that I could _not_? Refusing would have meant my rule would be constantly challenged from Zeus and Poseidon. What world would that be for you, for Hera, for Demeter, for Hestia? I was the eldest. I had to  _provide_. It was my birthright, but for the sake of everyone, I gave it up! I was born into a world at war, mother, and unlike you, I was willing to do _anything_ to stop it from happening again. And that has been my gravest error, I see that now. I have bent so much farther back than any of the others and yet you piteously tell me to bend further even as my back _breaks_!” His voice is a terrible thing, screeching in its self-grief. His tears fall openly now, her man-child; she has pried open his fingers, but at what cost? She has to reign him back in; focus on the girl, not his multitude of losses. 

“Hades…Calm yourself.” She tries to gently scold her stubborn child, old and hard as the deepest clay at the center of the earth, no — harder. He rubs his tears and looks away, ashamed of them no doubt. He is trying to calm himself, to summon the king’s mantle. He is looking towards Tartarus and she wonders if he is mentally preparing her bonds — or if he is preparing for his own.

“Mother, I cannot. I cannot lose her.” His grasp closes over the flower; she sees it as he wraps his arms around himself, soothing a long ago hurt. “I cannot. I cannot. I cannot. I’m sorry but —”

 _You are iron in your thinking_ , she thinks with a heavy sigh,  _how appropriate your throne_.  He moves away from her, muttering the same refrain; he is always moving away from her.

“Hades.” She calls him and he takes a deep breath, stills. Doesn't turn toward her, but she continues on. “My son. Answer me true, this question important above all others: Do you love the girl? Or do you love the sorrow that flows in her wake, the misery your siblings and I suffer for want of her?”

“The girl.” her wayward son says, his answer instantaneous and miserable. “I never wanted misery for Demeter or any of the others. I want only my wife, only my home. I have been a filial son, a supportive brother, regardless of my losses. I deserve to be given a chance to be a good husband.”

“I know.” She pats his shoulder; she is so tired, and he is so tired, and after hours of shouting, they are no closer to an answer that will satisfy every party. “But in keeping her, you cast yourself the villain. Justice does not matter to the starving, Hades. You must find a way to make this right before the others find a justification for killing you.”

He nods, serious and his eyes far-seeing; is he looking at the world above?

 “What if—if I would apologize to Demeter for…not seeking her permission, even if it was not required. The fault was not mine, but I can see…her offense. I did not mean to give her offense.” He licks his lips, her boy; he moves like her when he is thinking, and she can see the cogs in his brain working as he presses his tongue to his cheek. It is a better effort than anything else he's thought so far. “Perhaps if I went up and apologized for my oversight — she would be assuaged.”

“She wants more than that.” Truthfully, she does not know if even the restoration of the girl would be enough for Demeter now; her daughter has realized how little power a woman has, even a goddess — and she may well topple Zeus now, just to prevent another goddess from ever suffering a stolen child.

“I know.” He sounds tortured; she wonders if his own Erinyes dance upon his head. She places a hand on his shoulder in silent comfort, ignoring how odd it feels to do so. All she feels is the heaviness of his crown.

He is silent a long moment, thinking again, and then turns to her, and his eyes are horrible things: desperate flints, ready to spark a flame. “If…Demeter were indisposed of, could you restore the Earth?”

“Hades.” She thinks of Hera’s words, so few hours ago yet so long ago all the same:  _swallow her up, swallow her up, swallow her up._ Is that the true tragedy of this: that they are doomed to repeat their errors? That for every generation, there is a mad king? No. _No_ , Rhea will not accept this. 

“Could you do it? If she were…out of the way?”

“I don’t know.” She frowns. “But I do not think you would be a good husband if you killed your wife's mother, Hades. There is more than one way to lose a woman, and…I do not think the little flower will forgive you of such a sin.” She is certain that he can find a way to bend his rules to justify Demeter’s death — and she is certain Zeus will try his best to lead Hades down that path, if he is listening — but she is also certain Hades will do nothing that might lead him to lose the girl. If his iron-steadfastness is his greatest drawback, it can also be an advantage, at least in this part of the matter.

“Not killed. Detained. Temporarily.” He glances warily over to her. “Fratricide against Demeter…I would lose the girl, and I… No, that is not allowable.”

“If you hold Demeter against her will, you’ll be no better than Zeus,” Rhea says, soft. Hades' idea of _temporary_  and Zeus' are very different; by the time he releases Demeter, the entire Earth would be long dead. “Talk to your wife, Hades. If she knows of the situation, as you say, she may know better how to convince Demeter to lay down her weapon.”

He nods, once. Sighs. She sees the exhaustion in him, and, in truth, feels it in herself as well. This is devouring them all, this mess.

They stand together, two old and miserable gods, both looking at the dead land of the living above from the verdant underworld. _This was a mistake_ , Rhea thinks; then she looks at the little throne in front of her, and thinks, _maybe not_.

There is still a player who has yet to have her say, after all.

Perhaps he is thinking the same.

“…Would you like to join us for supper tonight, mother?” He asks, quiet as death. “I will let you see her. Perhaps between the three of us…” He leaves the rest of the sentence open, but she can see how desperately he wants this solved.

“I will,” she says. “I trust I may retire to my rooms until then?”

He nods, collapsing back onto his throne. She knows he will go to the girl the moment she leaves, but his eyes watch her the whole time as she takes the path back to the room she has been given.

On her bed, a single calla lily. A message from the girl, she knows; so, she was listening. She examines it: purple and yellow, smelling as fragrant as in the valleys above.

Rhea clutches it to her heart as she sits upon her bed, threading her fingers through the plant, holding it as she searches for answers in a puzzle without a satisfying solution.

**Author's Note:**

> This kind of spiralled out of a 3 sentence prompt on [the 3 Sentence Ficathon](https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/142463.html?page=5#comments) on DW for last_haven's prompt _Greek myth, any, there's nothing I can do when she cries for you in her sleep_. 
> 
> I'll clean this up for publication on Ao3, I thought. Then I uh....modified it quite a bit and it quickly became its own fic.


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